Medal of Honor Pacific Assault Hands-On

By Jason Ocampo, GameSpotPosted Oct 20, 2004 3:19 pm PT

We get our hands on this next-generation World War II action game.

In many ways, games such as Call of Duty and the upcoming Brothers in Arms owe a lot to Medal of Honor Allied Assault, EA's 2002 first-person shooter that helped usher in a new wave of cinematic first-person shooters. Allied Assault featured intense World War II battles that seemed directly inspired by those seen in big-budget Hollywood movies, such as Saving Private Ryan, letting gamers feel like they're on the front lines. Now, two years after Allied Assault, EA is busy putting the final touches on that game's successor, Medal of Honor Pacific Assault. We've been playing with a near-final version of the game and we have much to report.

You and your fellow Marines will battle across the Pacific in Medal of Honor Pacific Assault.

We played through the opening levels of the game, starting with Marine boot camp in San Diego, with a drill instructor straight out of Full Metal Jacket, but without the profanity. In addition to serving as a basic tutorial to the weapons and equipment in the game, boot camp will also serve as an introduction to your squadmates. EA really wants Pacific Assault to have a more coherent sense of story than earlier games, and your squadmates will add color and personality to the game. You'll also be able to issue them rudimentary squad commands in battle, though we'll cover that a bit later.

After boot camp, you're sent to Hawaii, where you report for duty on the morning of that infamous day in history. You'll open the level with one of the game's scripted sequences, with a Navy chief driving you around and giving you a tour of the naval base at Pearl Harbor. It's a nice little touch that lets EA show off some of the immense historical research in the game. After the air raid starts, though, you'll pick up a Thompson submachine gun and dodge strafing attacks in order to reach one of the torpedo boats tied to the docks. Once on board, you'll man one of the antiaircraft guns and try to down as many Japanese planes as you can while the torpedo boat goes on a harrowing speed run through the burning and exploding Battleship Row. This entire sequence is a lot more chaotic than it sounds, and there's plenty of action to keep you riveted the whole time.

It's during the Battleship Row sequence that the game actually changes gears a bit. The torpedo boat pulls up along the USS West Virginia, and you'll board her through a gaping hole in the hull. Your initial task will be to stop the ship from sinking by navigating through the smoke-filled engineering quarters and turning the valves needed to stabilize the flooding. After that, you'll climb up through the decks of the ship, pick up a fire axe, and try to save as many sailors as you can. You'll use the axe to knock down buckled hatches, and there's some rudimentary puzzle-solving involved here. For example, you must figure out how to blow open a locked metal hatch using the equipment around you. You can then pick up wounded sailors and deliver them to a nearby corpsman.

Pearl Harbor, or when Japanese Zeros attack.

On board the West Virginia is where you'll encounter one of the first hero moments in the game. These are optional moments where you have the opportunity to go above and beyond the call of duty by accomplishing a certain task. In this case, you need to locate and rescue the wounded executive officer of the West Virginia and then carry him to safety. Doing so will unlock a special keepsake that will appear in your locker in the game's shell, or main menu screen. If you examine the keepsake later on, you'll hear an audio flashback to the moment you earned the souvenir, as if you're reliving the moment in your mind.

EA decided to start fresh with Pacific Assault, so instead of using the Quake III engine that powered Allied Assault and many other first-person shooters, the company wrote a brand-new graphics engine built to take advantage of the latest hardware advances. As a result, Pacific Assault ups the visual ante considerably. For example, the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor is a visually dazzling sequence, with the air full of Japanese planes, flak bursts and bomb explosions everywhere, battleships burning in the distance, and sailors and Marines on the ground trying to fight back. But it's the subtle little details that will catch your eye, like the way your vision blurs when you're firing the heavy 50-caliber machine gun, or the way a concussion or blast will turn the world a blurry black and white.

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